The poems in Everything, Andrea Cohen’s seventh collection, traffic in wonder and woe, in dialogue and interior speculation. Humor and gravity go hand in hand here. Cohen’s poems have the rueful irony of a stand-up comic playing to an empty room.
In his daring sophomore collection Previously Owned , Nathan McClain interrogates his speaker’s American heritage, history, and responsibility. Insofar as this collection scrutinizes one’s own culpability in this country, interested in the natural world and beauty, as well as what beauty distracts us from, it does so in the hopes of reimagining inheritance, of leaving our children a different song